Enhancing Twenty-First-Century Skills among Fifth Grade
- Chicago The University of Chicago Press
- Vol 125 (4) : pages 550-700
Young children draw from verbal and nonverbal input to make meaning from texts, a skill that is foundational for later reading comprehension and academic achievement. However, prior studies have focused solely on teachers' verbal input during prekindergarten read-alouds. We examine four Black, female prekindergarten teachers' multimodal enactments of a text to identify how they socialize and orient children into language-building and meaning-making practices. Findings from our microethnographic analysis reveal four multimodal orientations: transmissive/ limited gesture, multimodal collaborative, multimodal de-scriber, and multimodal performance-oriented. Variations in teachers' inclusion of multiple modalities and child engagement indicate a constellation of multimodal read-aloud orientations and socialization practices along a spectrum of support. Teachers gestured to encourage en-gagement, index novel words, expand children's utterances, include culturally affirming discourse styles, and bridge the text into the classroom. We address how teachers express and represent meaning through language, im-ages, and gesture, as well as instructional implications of multimodal enactments.